School project savors savior's Holocaust work

Tuesday

FORT SCOTT, Kan. -- The young Kansas women have become known as the "rescuers of the rescuer."

FORT SCOTT, Kan. -- The young Kansas women have become known as the "rescuers of the rescuer."

What the four high-school students did started as a simple task: collaborate on a National History Day project to write a short play about an event from the past. What they did was discover, research and introduce to the world an unsung Polish heroine of the Holocaust, a woman who daringly saved about 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto yet remained virtually unknown to historians and the general public for more than 60 years.

"It's a little mind-boggling," said Megan Stewart-Felt, 22, one of the students. "Some days I almost can't believe this wonderful journey we've been on."

That journey began eight years ago when Stewart-Felt and three schoolmates in southern Kansas looked into the life of Irena Sendler, a Polish, Catholic social worker they had seen briefly mentioned in a magazine article about heroes of the Holocaust who never became as renowned as Oskar Schindler, the man who inspired the movie Schindler's List. The four students launched an Internet search but could find only sparse details on Sendler.

Fast forward to today:

With the help of a Jewish organization familiar with Sendler, the students tracked her down to a nursing home in Warsaw. They forged a deep friendship with her, made multiple trips to Poland to interview her and those she had saved and accumulated the world's most extensive clearinghouse of research and artifacts of her life and her contribution to history.

They completed their 10-minute play for that year's National History Day project, then expanded it into a 35-minute drama that they continue performing across the country and the world to standing-room-only audiences who watch it and weep.

They started a foundation in Sendler's name to keep her story alive, and one of the students this year helped launch an education center based in Kansas that helps schools nationwide assist students in tackling similar research projects, including one in Illinois that has the potential to become equally well known.

And just this month, 97-year-old Sendler, a woman once virtually anonymous to the world, was in the news as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, a fact that can almost entirely be attributed to four small-town students who were so inspired by her story that it has come to define their lives, even after they have graduated from high school and college, married and begun families of their own.

"Think of it," said Norm Conard, the young women's former social-studies teacher. "You have some rural, Protestant kids from a tiny place in Kansas who decide to tackle the story of a Polish, Catholic woman who saved thousands of Jews, despite the fact that they were raised in a place where there is virtually no one of Jewish ancestry. It makes absolutely no sense that Irena's story would end up getting told like this."

In 1999, Conard grouped four of his star pupils together for a History Day project and handed them a U.S. News & World Report article titled "The Other Schindlers."

"In the fall of 1999, we started trying to research Irena after seeing her mentioned in that article, but couldn't find much of anything on her," said one of the former students, Sabrina Coons-Murphy, 24. The two other students assigned to the project were Jessica Shelton-Ripper, now 23, and Elizabeth Cambers, now 21.

The four girls queried the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, a group that provides financial assistance to those who helped save Jews during the Holocaust. The girls' goal initially was to find out where Sendler was buried, but they received a stunning response. Sendler was alive and in remarkably good health in Poland.

The students began corresponding with Sendler and finished their play about her life. They called it Life in a Jar because of one of the most dramatic findings about the Polish woman: She had buried detailed lists of the ancestry and whereabouts of each child she rescued in glass jars under an apple tree in a friend's Warsaw yard. When Sendler was later caught by the Nazis, she refused to reveal the location of those jars even under torture and threat of execution.

"Those jars were literally jars of life," Stewart-Felt said, explaining that Sendler placed the children she rescued in the homes of non-Jewish Poles, Catholic convents and orphanages.

Almost every letter Sendler sent the young Kansas women -- there have been dozens translated from Polish to English -- began the same way: "My dear, beloved girls so close to my heart." Sendler wrote of the ways she had spirited children out of the Warsaw ghetto after gaining entrance as a city social worker and persuading their soon-to-die parents to give them up. In some cases she sedated crying infants and snuck them out in medical bags or carpenter's boxes.

The students sent Sendler a draft of their play. She critiqued it for them, requesting two minor changes, but said they had gotten virtually everything else right.

"I need to tell you," she wrote, "that you are uniquely wise, interesting and thinking girls full of sensitivity to troubling wars." Sendler explained that her parents had once taught her she was ethically bound to help a drowning person even if she could not swim herself.

In early 2000, the students performed Life in a Jar for the first time. People in the small Kansas crowd were sobbing by the end. Since then, even as the women began careers, they have continued to travel with the play, performing it in 20 states and three countries. A handful of young people have joined the cast. The play has been translated into Polish and is performed by schoolchildren in Poland as well.

This spring, Life in a Jar traveled to Canada at the request of Montreal resident Renata Zajdman, who at age 14 was rescued from the Warsaw ghetto by one of a small network of rescuers who reported to Sendler.

"The credit all goes to those kids in Kansas," said Zajdman, today 78 and a close friend of Sendler's. "If it were not for them, Irena would still be living in poverty. The president of Poland would not be kissing her hand. No one would bother with her. The children of Kansas put her on the map."

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.